Letter to the Editor
Editor,
Your recent article questioning whether Meaford should fill the position of CAO was excellent. It was balanced, factual, and provided a lot of good points.
Over the last few years municipalities have had many costs downloaded to them by various government sources and for smaller communities, like Meaford, this has proven very costly. Salaries (and benefits) are a huge portion of the budget, so perhaps Council could consider the alternatives to hiring a replacement Chief Administrative Officer. With the anticipated future costs of infrastructure replacements and the constant increase in consumption of energy I believe it would be prudent to NOT to hire another CAO.
The Clerk and Treasurer positions are the only requirements under the Municipal Act that must be filled. With the addition of someone with an engineering background ( i.e. Operations management) the municipality could function very well.
Also, with the experience gained by other senior department heads could lead us to reduced payroll and benefits costs. This is an important consideration in time of tight budgets and ‘doing more with less’.
Christine Codrington, Meaford
